ly autobiographic, has a greater freshness and
reality than the others and is full of personal recollections. In
these novels, as in his short stories, Taylor's pictorial skill is
greater on the whole than his power of creating characters or inventing
plots.

Literature in the West now began to have an existence. Another young
poet from Chester County, Pa., namely, Thomas Buchanan Read, went to
Cincinnati, and not to New York, to study sculpture and painting, about
1837, and one of his best-known poems, _Pons Maximus_, was written on
the occasion of the opening of the suspension bridge across the Ohio.
Read came East, to be sure, in 1841, and spent many years in our {542}
seaboard cities and in Italy. He was distinctly a minor poet, but some
of his Pennsylvania pastorals, like the _Deserted Road_, have a natural
sweetness; and his luxurious _Drifting_, which combines the methods of
painting and poetry, is justly popular. _Sheridan's Ride_--perhaps his
most current piece--is a rather forced production and has been
over-praised. The two Ohio sister poets, Alice and Phoebe Cary, were
attracted to New York in 1850, as soon as their literary success seemed
assured. They made that city their home for the remainder of their
lives. Poe praised Alice Cary's _Pictures of Memory_, and Phoebe's
_Nearer Home_ has become a favorite hymn. There is nothing peculiarly
Western about the verse of the Cary sisters. It is the poetry of
sentiment, memory, and domestic affection, entirely feminine, rather
tame and diffuse as a whole, but tender and sweet, cherished by many
good women and dear to simple hearts.

A stronger smack of the soil is in the negro melodies like _Uncle Ned_,
_O Susanna_, _Old Folks at Home_, _Way Down South_, _Nelly was a Lady_,
_My Old Kentucky Home_, etc., which were the work not of any southern
poet, but of Stephen C. Foster, a native of Allegheny, Pa., and a
resident of Cincinnati and Pittsburg. He composed the words and music
of these, and many others of a similar kind, during the years 1847 to
1861. Taken together they form the most original and vital addition
which this country has made to the psalmody {543} of the world, and
entitle Foster to the first rank among American song writers.

As Foster's plaintive melodies carried the pathos and humor of the
plantation all over the land, so Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's _Uncle
Tom's Cabin_, 1852, brought home to millions of readers the sufferings
of the